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Wangunyu, who came to the U.S. from Kenya in 2010, has worked multiple jobs and spent more than $10,000 of her own money to open Princeton Preparatory School: a Christian Montessori-style school in Kennesaw that will welcome its first class of 13 students Monday.

Despite the challenges, Wangunyu said she was never discouraged.

“Nothing cannot be done. I’m in the U.S.A. Everything is possible. That’s what I was told,” she said.

Although Wangunyu, 32, is opening her own school and will be its CEO, she is still a student at Kennesaw State University. The spark to start a school that taught the Montessori method of education came when she took a class with Feland Meadows, a Montessori specialist at KSU.

“I like the system of education,” she said. “I’m a product of Montessori, and it has done great things for me. I think outside the box. I’m not afraid to try new things.”

The Montessori method, named after the Italian educator Maria Montessori, emphasizes autonomy of students and self-guided education. Princeton Preparatory School will begin with students age 3 to 12, Wangunyu said.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday, the school’s staff introduced themselves to those in attendance and Kennesaw Mayor Mark Mathews wielded the scissors. Mathews said the school is one of many different types of schools in the city.

“It’s just another great opportunity for our children to learn, and we welcome all types of schools,” he said. “We have a multitude of different types of schools, whether they be preparatory schools like this, Montessori schools, charter schools. We’ve got a very diverse group of education facilities here in our city, and it makes it a great place.”

Mathews said he’s glad Wangunyu made the decision to open her school in Kennesaw. The school is on Lockhart Drive near the county’s airport.

“I look forward to coming out and spending some time with them and learning a little more about their process,” Mathews said.

Wangunyu said she’s happy she is able to get the school open, not just because she succeeded at what she set out to do, but because it gives her a chance to give back to the community.

“I don’t think it’s beneficial to succeed without impacting other people,” she said.

Getting started

Wangunyu said when she first came to the U.S., she wanted to work for the United Nations and started studying international affairs.

“As I went on with my studies, I realized that’s not what I wanted to do,” she said.

Wangunyu said she loves to volunteer, and while interning and working with children with Lutheran Services of Georgia one day in 2013, her supervisor asked her what she wants to be doing in five years.

“I told her, ‘Well, since I’ve been working with kids, I kind of want to work with children,’” Wangunyu said.

The supervisor recommended a program offered by the International Rescue Committee that helps provide training to minority women to become teachers, she said. She said she signed up for the program and immediately began trying to find a building for a school.

Wangunyu found a location and signed a lease, but when she went back to the program and told them she was ready to get started, they told her to slow down.

“They told me, ‘Well, no. You’re moving too fast. It’s going to take you about two years to get started.’ So I told them, ‘You know what? Then I want out because I want to start now.’ And they told me, ‘Well, it’s going to take a lot of money, and you’re just a student.’”

Officials with the IRC told her to go ahead with her plans, however, so Wangunyu leased a building, paid the first month’s rent and a security deposit and started buying furniture and supplies. However, two weeks later, she said she found out the woman she signed a lease with was not the property owner, but someone renting the property themselves.

“I lost my money and my key was taken away from me for seven months, but it didn’t stop me. I kept buying furniture. My garage was full of stuff,” she said.

Bouncing back

After losing about $3,000 in the deal, Wangunyu bided her time and eventually, the property was sold, she said. The new owner offered to lease the building to her after finding out about her previous attempts to rent the property, Wangunyu said, so she started moving in.

She said it took about $10,000 to get the building renovated and ready for students, and she didn’t receive any outside funding. To pay for it, Wangunyu said she worked multiple jobs while enrolled at KSU.

“I’ve been an emissions inspector. I’ve worked in a hotel as a night auditor. I’ve worked at Kennesaw State. I’ve worked as a nurse’s aide. Anything I can do.”

Wangunyu said the school has seven people on staff, including Dana Miller, the school’s director who worked as a teacher in public schools for 15 years before joining Wangunyu’s school. She commended Wangunyu on all the time and effort she put into making the school a reality.

“She has done literally everything in that building herself,” Miller said. “She did the painting, she did the décor, she did all the knocking down and cleaning out. She has done all the elbow grease there.”

Miller will oversee the operation of the school, handle student discipline, write grants on behalf of the school and work on community outreach. She will also be one of the main points of contact for parents. One of the biggest draws of the school, Miller said, is its extracurricular offerings.

“The biggest selling point I think we have that differentiates us from our local cohorts is the fact that our tuition includes all of the kids’ extracurricular things,” she said. “They don’t pay any extra for things like karate classes, piano classes, language classes — all of those things are inherent in their tuition and all they have to do is choose what they want to take.”

Wangunyu said tuition at the school is about $650 per month for students ages 3-5 and about $950 per month for students age 6-12, but she said as part of the school’s opening, parents will not pay tuition for their children’s first month at the school.

The school is about 6,000 square feet and could handle up to 120 students, but a group that large would require more staff, Wangunyu said.

The Montessori method

Miller said one of the key tenants of the Montessori method is to give children autonomy in how they learn.

“The basic notion of Montessori is that you let the kid drive their interest in a subject. That’s not to say, as many of the naysayers say, that you just don’t teach them and you let them get away with not learning something — that’s not the case. But it opens the possibilities of how they approach the materials.”

Each classroom will have a poster board, Miller said, which lists tasks the students must accomplish within a specific time frame.

“But they are given, for each task, multiple ways that they can go about it,” she said.

Meadows, the KSU professor helping the school with its accreditation, said traditional schools group children by age and gives them the same curriculum, but students the same age could have vast differences in learning style or ability. Montessori schools, Meadows said, group students together in groups of three years: birth to 3 years old, 3 to 6 years old, etc.

This grouping also helps teachers by giving them the same students for three years, fostering a familiarity with the children they teach, Meadows added.

In terms of curriculum, Meadows said it is chosen to line up with the way children develop. For example, students in the 3-6 age group use curriculum in categories such as practical life, sensorial development, language development, math development, science and culture, Meadows said.

“They’re classified and ordered on the shelf in the sequence that children go through when they’re developing, so every child in a Montessori classroom has an individual education plan,” he said.

Montessori schools have produced some successful alumni, Meadows said. The founders of Google, Wikipedia and Amazon.com were all Montessori students, Meadows said, as are actors George Clooney, Helen Hunt and Anne Hathaway.